A little guitar duet I improvised a while ago. It actually evolved from a multitracked version of Salley Gardens. I couldn’t get the tone I wanted from the main melody, but really liked some of the fills and frills, so here they are stitched into a short guitar piece. Maybe I’ll go back to it sometime and add some more layers as I did with Moonflow.
Backup:
Back in the Dark Ages, I used to spend a lot of time sitting in the Refectory Lounge at what was then called the University College of North Wales, Bangor. No doubt I should have been in the library, but was likelier to be mistreating a guitar, often in the company of other guitar addicts, including David Higgen, who was better known in those days as Mex. (It must have been a student thing that no one called David should be known by their real name, since I was mostly known at that time as Bert.)
I’ve lost touch with most of the people I knew then apart from Sally Goddard (with whom I used to sing, and who visits my part of Cornwall quite regularly). I’d lost touch with Mex, too, but when I mentioned his name in a blog article, he picked up on it and contacted me, which is nice. During one of our recent exchanges, I mentioned this thing that we used to do as a rather flippant guitar duet. He didn’t remember it, but started to nag me to include it here. I don’t remember exactly how it went (or even what we called it, if we called it anything at all, and I can’t remember Mex’s riff either), but it went something like this. I suppose I ought to have another go to correct a couple of bits of slightly suspect notes and timing (but as Broonzy said, there’s no such thing as a strict 12-bar; or something like that, though I suspect that he had in mind putting in an extra bar, rather than an extra beat). I guess I should put in a second guitar part in at some time, but in the meantime…
I’m not planning on putting it on an album, but never say never.
David Higgen has a lot of very interesting stuff on YouTube.
Sally Goddard has been singing for many years with the Canada-based folk band Atlantic Union, which has put out several classy CDs.
And here’s that boogie thing. Feel free to tell me to boogie off.
Backup:
The album Hands of the Craftsman has now been expanded to include some of the additional material made available in the book of the album. The number of tracks has been doubled, but the price hasn’t! That’s because although there are a couple of tracks there that were recorded recently, most of the additions are still from the 1980s sessions that were afflicted with ‘sticky shed syndrome’, which degraded the quality of the master tapes. (I’m not claiming that they were that good to start off with!)
In general, the additions weren’t specifically written for the revue, but were either written around the same time, or were written before or after but fit the theme.
The expanded version is still on Bandcamp: I may add the new tracks to streaming platforms in due course, but that’s not a priority. I expect to be long departed by the time Spotify etc. make enough out of me to send a payment…
David Harley
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